That is partly true. The figures are only in relation to ‘reported crime’ and shouldn’t correlate to actual crime. To state ‘homophobic hate crime’ as being down is incorrect. However I disagree with it being a ‘bloody waste of time’. Hate crime detections and prosecutions are actually quite high (compared with other detection rates). Yes, the criminal justice system often lets down victims of crime but the majority are successfully prosecuted and as LGBT citizens we need to ensure that remains the case and report all hate crime lest the ‘authorities’ get the impression it’s less severe than it actually is.

An important change has taken place.
Following the lessons learned from the tragic murder of Stephen Lawrence, a (possible) hate crime was flagged as such if the officer, the victim or anyone else thought it was a hate crime.

The community must have confidence that suspect incidents are investigated as possible hate crimes, otherwise they don’t believe that it has been investigated properly. It’s a matter of public confidence.

A couple of years ago in my local LGBT police forum, the police failed to list as hate crimes, incidents we already knew about. Instead, a new set of exceptions had come into play.
In a couple of cases the victims didn’t want the incident listed as a hate crime. (In one they changed their minds later, in the other it would have revealed the victim was having hanky panky).

The police still don’t seem to know how many incidents have been de-classified.

So they simply don’t know whether numbers have gone up, down, or stayed the same.

The fact that you have a huge gap between how people feel and official statistics indicates that not all crimes are reported (though tabloids tend to make people more paranoid too). If you look at the ridiculos sentencing in some high-profile cases, one might understand why reporting crimes seems a waste of time to many…

I’m not so sure about that. If you’ve noticed, our opponents have been particularly silent since the violence erupted in France. They don’t want to be associated with any of that which would only harm their ’cause’ if you could call it that. If anything, it might motivate some to evolve. They’d be very foolish to spin it to their advantage too. Either way, what happened in France hasn’t really given them a boost, quite the opposite. I suspect for many, it’s had a very sobering effect on them. They can’t afford to be seen fomenting similar anti-social behaviour any more.

I don’t believe these fiddled statistics being reported about crime in the UK today by a some austrailian think tank . Just recently my friend was victim of attempted mugging coming home but she scared the scum off, she went to the police station, told what happened , the guy on the desk said they were already on the case as similar description of mugger was by someone else and police were at scene, Transpired 3 people were victims of attempted mugging that night but only details were reported of one victim. Hence 2 persons were obsolete from statistical data. I would suspect this is common practice.
As for homophobic crime most is unreported , as nothing is done about it if you do, and then when it occurs again, it seems pointless to bother for most as they have lost faith in the service.

Over the past couple of years the same criteria for homophobic and transphobic crime have been used, but exceptions have been introduced. In Croydon we’ve had cases where the incident was not classed as a hate crime because the victim asked for it not to be.
This does nothing to reassure other LGBT people who see it as a hate crime, and see that it will not now be investigated as such.
The police seem to have no way of knowing how many such crimes have been de-classified. So any claim that homophobic and transphobic hate crime have gone down, would seem to be groundless. They don’t know, and we don’t know whether it has gone up, down, or stayed the same.

I’m waiting for some phoney pc liberal telling how tolerant London is(in their bubble), to reply with the usual comment they leave on these threads , telling us how once they were in deepest darkest southwark or someit at a bashment gig ,kissing their man and everyone was all warm and fluffy, as if their convenient story is convincing. Well my fella got glassed just off soho for kissing me. I never see same sex affection on the streets of London except maybe at pride or outside comptons, and we all know why.

Where do you live Rapture? I recently held hands with a guy I was dating in Canary Wharf. I’ve also done it across London. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t do it in Peckham/Tottenham or such places, but we can’t sit back and complain – we need to do something about it – create visibility in safer places, it’s a start! Saying that, I’ve seen two separate incidences of lesbians openly kissing in Tooting of all places!

Do we really need to waste the time of the Police and our own by reporting every single incidence of homophobic abuse? Okay, for example someone asks “Do you like dicks?”, would you classify that as homophobic?

I have no faith in the system whatsoever.

The crime isn’t decreasing, its just the number of people reporting them are decreasing. We shouldn’t however, just accept abuse as part of being gay.

This is more of an indication of the police’s refusal to make proper reports than of any actual drop, if anything the bashing seems to have gotten substantially worse in the past three years or so. Mostly due to importing new religious jackasses to take over the bashing duties.

I am very suspicious of claims made about falling crime figures. Especially since a recent Facebook thread described how a cyclist who was assaulted by a motorist in a road rage attack was told that his assailant would not be prosecuted because he had no record. If they aren’t prosecuting people because they don’t have a record, and therefore not giving people a record in the first place so that they can be prosecuted, there’s only one way for crime figures to go.

Hi there, I am very interested in talking to people who are currently experiencing homophobic hate crime across the boroughs of London, but also within Tower Hamlets. If you’d like to talk to me in confidence, I’d be most grateful. Contact me at unreportedfilms@gmail.com Many thanks.